Sexuality, Print, and Popular Visual Culture in the United States, 1830-1870

Reference Type Thesis
Year of Publication
2009
Contributors Author: Katherine Noel Hijar
Number of Pages
571 pp.
Language
University
Johns Hopkins University
Thesis Type
Ph.D. Dissertation
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the way that urban gender identities were represented in subversive verbal and visual sources published in the United States between 1830 and 1870. It shows the ideological work of racy newspapers and novels, sensational gothic and “mysteries of the city” narratives, pornographic texts, brothel guides, lithographs, and a very rare set of brothel paintings. I read both visual and verbal sources closely to illuminate the ways that these sources defined notions of manhood, created an imagined community of men, and justified male sexual aggression against women. This project shows how authors and artists imagined social relations, creating ideal authorial personas who mastered city spaces, dominated other men, and enjoyed sexual mastery over women. By defining both positive and negative male and female identities, authors and artists also defined the limits of social and political change. This is a story of the subversive American imagination, and illuminates two kinds of public spheres: a Habermasian world of male public spaces, and an Andersonian one bound together by print forms. This project unfolds in both public and private spaces, moving from spectacles of manhood and womanhood on city streets to dangerous private spaces and inverted, erotically charged domestic ones in which male fancy orders the scene. Rapid urbanization and technological advances created just the right climate for a proliferation of subversive print sources, which expressed the interests, aspirations, and fears of an inter-urban community of authors, artists, and editors. Sources produced in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were read in a variety of cities large and small, and although this is an urban story, it also tells of nationwide and transnational ideas about race, gender, and the relationship between ideologies and power. From the fringes of popular culture, authors and artists imagined public and private life in urban communities, and this subversive literature was part of a dialogue, in print, with urban moral reform literature. While my sources aimed to undermine dominant ideologies and social practices, they also reinforced many popular ideas about gender, race, and hierarchies of difference, making white male privilege seem natural.